


The Golden Days

by thevoiceoflightcity



Category: Portal (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Greg Is A Prick, Old Aperture, Uploading, What Once Was, i don't know what to tag this as hell
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-07
Updated: 2016-06-07
Packaged: 2018-07-12 19:00:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7118620
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thevoiceoflightcity/pseuds/thevoiceoflightcity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cave Johnson is dead and rotting, and Caroline is CEO, grieving and exhausted and too stubborn to rest.  (Caroline-to-GLaDOS filling-in-the-blanks fic. Maybe some Cave/Caroline. If you squint. I dunno.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Golden Days

**Author's Note:**

> I'd like to note that this was my first ever fic published here (technically lima syndrome was first but I wrote this much earlier,) and I am keeping it solely because nostalgia. One of these days I'm going to fix the formatting too but I'm too lazy for that today.

She's so tired.  
So, so tired.  
She hasn't slept properly for three months, his face, his voice haunting her through the night. And when she turns over, yawns, finally gets drowsy - plans out tomorrow's itinerary in her head -

She realizes that's not her job anymore; she's CEO now.  
And Cave Johnson, maverick, genius, is dead.  
He'd led Aperture for decades, and _she'd_ been at his side. Always. From that first starstruck day to the very end, when he'd somehow made them drag the intercom down to the hospital bed, still recording messages eighteen hours before his heart stopped. She'd never listened to the last ones – she couldn’t bear to hear it, couldn’t make herself listen to him dying all over again. She set them up – set them to run in the testing tracks, because that’s what he would have wanted, but she made Greg edit them down. She didn’t want to hear it. Not again. And then when they moved to the new reconfigurable facility, when she was standing in the control room for the last time –  
-well, she shut down everything else, but she could not, would not turn off the intercom.  
It comforted her, somehow, to know that he was still there, still talking to air in that way he used to, still cheerful and crazy and amazing. If she'd just go down, he’d still be there. Even if she could never bring herself to do it.  
He was a genius, is the thing. A mad genius, yes, there was no doubt of that. Ninety percent of his ideas were insane, absolutely bonkers, things no sensible person would suggest. The reverse Heimlich - now _that_ was a failure of massive proportions.  
But when they did work - well, they still weren't anything a sane person would suggest, but that didn't stop him. Nothing stopped him. And they were spectacular. Amazing.  
She was the one who sorted the good from the bad, and she was the one who did the paperwork when he insisted. She hired the lawyers and held them together through the missing astronaut hearings. All he'd do was roar "Why not marry safe science if you love it so much!?" She kept the company afloat through thick and thin and thin and thin.  
It was her. But it wasn't her alone.  
"Oh, Mr. Johnson..." she whispers.  
She leans against the cold, metallic silver-white panel, head in her arms. She should be somewhere, doing something, probably some meeting, but she's just so… _tired_. She should be doing Science.  
"Miss Caroline?"  
Her head snaps up with an Aperture employee's reflexes, eyes wide, dark hair flashing around her. She squints at the figure in the doorway.  
Greg.  
"I thought I told you to go to Accounting and talk to Stephen."  
"I sent the coffee boy, Miss Caroline," he says, his smile too wide and too cheerful.  
"Well, go do the recall then," she snaps at him, voice thick with barely-disguised disgust. She hates him, all of him, his too-wide smile, the way he's always whispering in the corners with Harry from R &D. About the GLaDOS project. Or so he claims. It's all she ever hears from him: _It's the GLaDOS project, Miss._ And she _still_ doesn't know what that is - he refuses to tell her, the blithering idiot He claims Cave himself said she should be kept out of it, despite the fact that she knows he trusted her more than any man in Aperture. He's lying, she knows it, but she's too tired to really care. Her world is paperwork and false smiles and acting like she knows what she’s doing for the cameras; as long as he’s off her back, he can go ahead and build _baking-soda volcanoes_ in the back room. Little prick.  
"I've done them, Miss Caroline. You're talking to the CEO of Atlas Industries next."  
Her temper flares, stoked by stress and sleep loss and grief.  
"No, I'm not."  
His awful patronizing smile falters a little, and then flashes back into power. Oh, how she wishes he'd just - shove off, for once, and _leave her alone._ He'd always wanted her job, the rat, since she was a young thing of nineteen and absolutely infatuated with Cave Johnson, leader of the rising new company Aperture Science Innovators. She remembered him, back when his hairline was lower, protesting Cave hiring her. She didn't know if he thought she couldn't do it because she was a girl, or because he was just a jerk.  
But oh, God, did she hate him. The insults she'd brew up in her head, scathing retorts she'd never had the courage to say.  
"...What?"  
"I'm going down to Old Aperture," she says suddenly, words spilling off her tongue before she can think about it. "Tell the CEO to wait. Or even better, do it yourself for once."  
"You can't-" he stutters almost plaintively, eyes wide.  
Her head snaps up, eyes suddenly dangerous, and she gives one of her famous glares. The _Caroline Scorcher,_ he'd call them, a laugh in his voice. She is a gem -  
"I can do whatever I damn well want to, Greg." she snarls, and sails past him, head held high  
"And don't you dare follow me. Go play your stupid games with Henry. I'm going alone."  
She's at the new glass elevator in seconds, waits another unbearable second until the doors open, and then it takes her away with a whoosh.  
He watches disbelievingly as she disappears out of sight...  
...Down.  
To Old Aperture. And the recordings-  
His eyes widen in realization, and then narrow, his awful smile widening again  
"Oh yes,” he hisses to the air. "I'll talk to Henry."  
And then he's gone too.  
===============  
It takes her down.  
Her feet tap nervously against the black floor, hands rapping a muffled rhythm against the padded walls. She's still not used to the new elevators. Before, whenever they moved the facility (two times, and it was nerve-wracking as hell for her, organizing every new catwalk, taking to the construction teams when they got stubborn, smooth-talking the OSHA inspector out the door) they’d keep the same basic layout - metal and concrete, gel pipes and always the same iron-grille elevators. This is different. This new facility is fully reconfigurable, modular down to the picometer, powered by nanobot construction crews. Aperture Science will never have to spend time and money moving house again; _this_ facility will never get old or outdated, permanently updated by microscopic robots.  
The nanobots – _that_ was a good idea, and it would sell well to, if they could only figure out a way to make sure Black Mesa wouldn't rip them off. Well, that was if they even got them working in the first place, but they're nearly finished; only a few bugs to iron out.  
They still need a control, though. Something to keep it all synchronised. She frowns, thinking. Right now, they've got a security team watching all the camera feeds, but they're Greg-hired, a useless bunch of overmuscled couch potatoes. They'll be watching her right now, actually, through the elevator camera, but it doesn't bother her. After a few decades at Aperture, you get very used to being watched.  
But the new facility is bigger than anything else they've ever constructed, and just the test subject cameras alone require walls and walls of monitors. They can't really watch everything at once; they're only human, after all. And if they'd one thing she's sure of, it's that they need to watch, need to see every corner of every room. For Science, after all.  
An AI - an artificial intelligence - would be perfect for the job. A computer wouldn't have any problems with watching a thousand cameras at once; it could monitor, control, send the nanobots where they're needed instantly. It could do it all at once, unlike any human mind on this earth.  
(And if she's honest, there's something sentimental there too - AI was Cave's last obsession, his ultimate crazy out-of-the-blue idea. She remembers him, in his hospital bed, coughing so hard he could barely talk and still managing to rant about it, a computer with the brain of a man, only much, much smarter.)  
But when she tells Greg, all he does is smile and tell her they're working on it. If she weren’t CEO, she could go down and check for herself; secretaries, she has learned, are invisible. Give her a clipboard and a plastic name tag and she can go anywhere – or she could, before her face was plastered on every notification and poster in the facility.  
She wonders, again, idly, what the GLaDOS project is. The only meaning she knows for DOS is diversity oriented synthesis. She learned that in chemistry, thirty years back. Hopefully it's at least somewhat useful to testing, to Science.  
Twenty, ten, as little as two years ago, she wouldn't have let it pass, she wouldn't have let it go until she knew. She'd have _attacked_ it, like she attacked every obstacle, every problem that got in her way. She would have torn it apart. She would have found out. Whatever it took. For Science.  
And now?  
There's no denying it, not anymore: she gives up. She had to admit it; she can't keep Science going, not alone, not at her age. She still believes in it, and she always will, but she can't _do_ it. It's a fact, a cold hard fact, not a hypothesis or a theorem or anything else.  
She can't. Not anymore. (Not without him.)  
===============  
It takes her a few minutes, but she's the CEO, godammit, and today she feels like abusing that power. She even fires one of the guards, just for fun.  
_You. Yes, you! Box. Your stuff. Out the door. Parking lot. Now._  
Not you, test subject, you're doing fine.  
And so she steps into the old elevator, gaining some small comfort from the feel of the metal grille under her stylish-but-practical black shoes. It starts downward with a jerk and a cough, grinding the first out of the gears. Nobody's been down here for almost exactly three months. She'd forgotten how slow the old elevators are, but jerk by jerk, she gets there.  
Walking into the control room is the strongest deja vu she's ever felt.  
For an impossible instant she's convinced it's all back to normal, the controls are shiny and new, the windows clear, the faint sound of typing coming from the office complex, and when she turns the corner he'll be there, in his best suit, yelling into the mike, and then he'll turn -  
_There you are, Caroline. Brought my coffee? I've got an idea, and it's a damn good one too. Get the typewriter._ Then he’d look up, and his eyes would be burning with that visionary fire, and he’d smile, and wink – _We’ve got Science to do._  
"Yes sir, Mr. Johnson," she whispers, the old air dry at the back of her throat.  
And then her own voice, weak and crumbling, snaps her out of it; it's the voice of an old woman, because she _is_ old. Her hands are wrinkled and her hair is grey and Cave Johnson is dead and rotting.  
She sits down in the musty chair that doesn't smell like him anymore and finally, finally, out of view of the cameras-  
Caroline cries.  
===============  
"Is it ready?"  
"Greg, are you-"  
_"Is it ready?"_  
" Yes! Yes! Of course it's ready! It's been practically ready since the day he died and left it behind! Of course it's ready!"  
"We're doing it today."  
"Today? But -"  
"You _said_ it was _ready!"_  
"It is! But we had a plan, you can't just - "  
"She went down into Old Aperture. I'm taking a few of the boys. Finally get rid of the old bitch.”  
"Greg?"  
===============  
She wanders the hallways alone, shivering slightly.  
She remembers it, every inch, remembers it in clear and agonizing detail.  
_This_ is the desk that kept rattling, and he fired the poor man assigned to it three times – and every time she’d hire them back, knowing he wouldn’t notice -  
_This_ is where the coffee machine used to be, horrible thing, spewing out that awful sludge day and night, and he _liked_ it that way -  
_This_ is the easy chair he'd sit on when he was dictating, hands drawing invisible patterns in the air, ideas that he saw so clearly, and none else understood but her -  
She's obsessed with him.  
She was going to have to face it sometime.  
She's been obsessed with him since the day she read the article about the up-and-coming Aperture Fixtures converting into an R &D company - doing Science - and the crazy young Cave Johnson as CEO. And then three years later she marched into his office and _demanded_ the job.... boldest thing she'd ever done, and it was worth it.  
_(I like your style, kid.)_  
He hired her, and it was glorious. The golden years.  
It wasn't even a romantic obsession. Not really. Just a hopeless, brainless adoration. Of him, and of Science.  
Now it's over. No. No, he's gone, but she's still obsessed.  
(It's ironic, if you think about it: she knows all about the five stages of grief, and she's always been stubborn, but she didn't think it with take her three months to get past denial.)  
She's running through the offices now, opening doors and slamming then, _please_ be there, please, just behind that door, _please -_  
And then.  
Space.  
No office, no waiting rooms, just empty black space behind the doorframe. She steps forward into the dark, staring upwards, and eyes wide and uncertain.  
With a snap and a pop, the lights flick on, illuminating -  
A test chamber. Oh.  
It's a conversion gel test, one of the half-built ones they never quite finished before Cave died and everything changed. The gel pipe is dry but crusted with that white portal-capable residue it leaves behind everywhere.  
Yes.  
_Here_ the recordings would be active, his last ones, installed and then left behind, no recordings for the new facility. Yes. She runs forward, waves her arms, shouts nonsense into the motion sensor.  
_Cave Johnson here._  
Yes, yes, there he is, and she's getting into a worrying habit about this crying thing, because-  
(Am old woman crying in a test chamber. It’s happened before, but not in this context. Funny thing.)  
_Alright, I've been thinking. When life gives you lemons?_  
Make lemonade. It's the lemon speech. She's heard this one so many times and new she'd pay anything to hear it again, Science be damned-  
_Don't make lemonade! Make life take the lemons back!_  
_Yeah,_ she mouths, and then realizes she's alone-  
_Get mad! I don't want your damn lemons, what am I supposed to do with these?_  
-And she shouts it: Yeah!"  
_Demand to see life's manager! Make life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons! So you know who I am?_  
"Yeah!"  
_I'm the man who's going to BURN YOUR HOUSE DOWN! With the LEMONS!_  
"Burn his house down!"  
_I'm going to have my engineers invent a combustible lemon that BURNS YOUR HOUSE DOWN!_  
"Burning people!" sings Caroline. "He says what we're all thinking!" And he breaks off into a series of awful, tracking coughs that bring her back to reality.  
_The point is: If we can store music on a compact disc -_  
She hasn't heard this before.  
_\- why can't we store a man's intelligence and personality on one? So I have the engineers figuring that out now._  
Oh. _Oh._  
_Brain mapping. Artificial Intelligence. We should have been working on it thirty years ago._  
And with a click like a heart breaking, it all falls into place.  
She's not stupid, after all. She couldn't have done everything that she did if she were a stupid woman. Maybe she was in denial. But with those few words, it's suddenly all there.  
-his last obsession-  
-AI-  
-immortality-  
-we're working on it -  
-brain mapping-  
-the GLaDOS project-  
_I will say this - and I'm gonna say it on tape so everybody hears it a hundred times a day: If I die before you people can pour me into a computer, I want Caroline to run this place._  
DOS. Disk Operating System. How could she have been so stupid?  
_Hell, put her in my computer, I don't care._  
She knows. Impossibly, she knows what's coming. There are reasons she's the CEO of the biggest and best Science company in the world, Black Mesa be damned. Caroline of Aperture is not a stupid woman, and she's connecting the dots.  
_Now she'll argue. She'll say she can't._  
She doesn't move. Can't move. Scream frozen in her throat, begging him not to say it, please, Mr. Johnson, please -  
_She's modest like that._  
Please, oh god no, please –  
_But you MAKE HER._  
She can hear the elevator rattling downwards, coming for her-  
_You MAKE HER!_  
but the awful anger in his voice cuts farther into her soul than anything else ever could, the horrible knifelike _power_ of it ripping her apart.  
(No, Mr. Johnson, she begs, no, I don't want this)  
_Allright, test's over. You can head on back to your desk._  
The elevator's nearly here. Fight or flight, hide or scream? _(You MAKE HER)_ and she can’t think, can’t speak, her wonderful brain stuck in mid-leap like a computer hitting a glitch.  
If she could get to the new facility - the elevators still recognize her fingerprints, they'd have to, not even Greg could change that, she's got the highest clearance in Aperture (or does she?) But they've got the elevator, and she can't use the test subject elevator. It won't even open if she hasn't done the test, but she has no portal gun nor gel to do it with. If she makes it, though, once she's at the surface she could go to the police, he couldn't just take her, that kind of thing doesn't happen outside -  
No, she can't assume, he might just be coming to check on her, she can't jump to conclusions. He can't just kidnap her, whatever Cave Johnson said, that's against the rules. He can’t. Nobody can. It’s not possible, please don’t let it be possible. But oh God, even as she thinks it she knows it's not true. Aperture can do anything. Has done anything, for Science. (You monster.)  
(Missing astronaut trials)  
(I'm the CEO goddamn it)  
(No please Mr. Johnson no I don't)  
_ding._  
And finally, finally, she runs.  
She circles behind the half-built walls, to the edge of the room. There's sections of sheet metal out here, leaned against each other, creating hundreds of nooks and crannies perfect for hiding in, there's no time left to run. Maybe just maybe they'll miss her, think she's moved on, and -  
_There,_ a scrap of bar metal, the perfect size for her hand, and she grabs it, though it's heavy and cumbersome - and then she vaults over a last piece of metal, and ducks down, back against the cold steel, waiting.  
And waiting.  
Footsteps. A thump. A curse. She pushes back into her hiding place. Shivers.  
"Miss Caroline?"  
His voice is like a bolt of ice down her throat, because it is Greg, and the tone of his voice makes it very, _very_ certain that he’s not here to check on her.  
"Miss Caroline, we know you're in here!" he singsongs, abysmally cheerful even now.  
More footsteps. It's not just him. Four, five people. A whisper she can't hear enough to understand.  
"Miss Caroline, we just want to talk to you!"  
_Fat chance,_ she thinks. Grips the bar tighter. His voice is moving around, but she doesn't dare look.  
"You see, your Mr. Johnson left some of your precious Science behind with us! For you to do!"  
He's getting closer. Closer.  
"He left the blueprints behind and everything! All we had to do was finish it and hook it up!" He's right behind her now, any second he'll see her, any second -  
"It's a wonderful machine, believe me, Miss Caroline! Just per-"  
And then he's right above her, and she swings the bar upwards, not looking, aiming for his voice.  
He cuts off with a splutter and a muffled wet _thunk._  
_"Bitch!"_ he howls, voice thick with blood and pain. The other footsteps accelerate, running, and there's two hands on her arm, harsh fingers jerking her upwards, feet scrabbling ageist the unforgiving concrete.  
"The bitch broke by dose!"  
He's not holding her, that's two men, big and burly, that she vaguely recognized as part of the security team. Two more behind them. Greg's holding his broken, bloody nose in both hands, still hissing curses furiously.  
"Bitch," he says again. And in the background, the recording starts up again, motion sensor re-triggered.  
_Now, if I die before you people can pour me into a computer -_  
"Bastard," she whispers, not sure who she's taking to anymore.  
"What?" slurs Greg.  
"You're a lying, cheating bastard. You're not in it for the Science. You never were. All you want is my job." She's shouting now, in tandem with the voice from the ceiling.  
_Now she'll argue, she'll say she can't._  
"You're a bastard, Greg, and you're going to kill me for money, for a job. I hate you. I hate you, and will never, _ever,_ let it go again. I swear it by all the gods and by Science and by Cave Johnson’s ghost that _whatever you do to me_ I'll hate you until the end of time, until _forever_ , you _bastard."_  
He stares at her incredulously for a moment and then he starts to laugh. It’s a broken, manic sound, blood bubbling around his ruined nose, gurgling laughter like a demon out of the depths of hell.  
_You make her._  
You MAKE HER!  
"Oh, Miss Caroline," he says. "Can you hear yourself? How many people have _you_ murdered for money?"  
"None," she snarls, heart beating in her throat, traitor tears gathering at the edges of her eyes.  
" _Testing,_ darling. How many people have died in testing?"  
"That was for Science!"  
" _No it wasn't!_ " he roars, suddenly inches from her face, blood flecking her dress. He takes a deep breath, and smiles. "It never was. How does knowing that a certain combination of chemicals that's blue and bounces dissolves people's skeletons help Science in any way? What is the knowledge that a different combination doesn't do anything but give you inoperable cancer doing for Science? _Nothing._ Nothing."  
And then something icy cold slides into her left arm.  
"Say goodbye, Caroline."  
She knows it's a syringe before she looks down, already empty, its contents riding her bloodstream towards her heart.  
Greg turns away, still holding his nose. Murmuring something. And then (fast acting sedative, she thinks) (is she hallucinating) and then the recording starts up again.  
_Now if I die before you people can pour me into a computer -_  
She may be screaming. She can’t tell. Did she do the appointments for tomorrow yet? She just, juss555t hopes she did, or he’ll have to do them himself –  
Is she falling asleep? She can’t fall sleep she has to do the  
Or he’ll forget! She can’t fall asleep! He needs her, Cave Johnson needs her, Science _needs her!_ ssssssSS$$$he can’t-  
The floor swims up toward her and  
everything goes silently and awfully  
dark.  
===============  
She's sobbing. Somewhere far away, the tears drip off her cheeks and onto the sterilized plastic floor.  
Mr. Johnson -  
"I don't want this."  
"I don't want this."  
"I do not want this!"  
She can't keep track of time. It surges forward in leaps and gulps, swallowing everything she ever cared for, drowning it all in thick sweet liquid night that surges down her throat and seizes her heart. The seconds fall between her fingers, slowly, smashing on the floor, a million billion cracked fragments like her own broken mind.  
The dark -  
===============  
(They don't anesthetize her during the procedure itself, of course. They need her mind clear. And even as everything she ever was and wanted to be dissolves into so much meaningless static, the last thing -)  
(The last thing she feels is hate.)  
(Then nothing.)  
_[Genetic Life-form and Disk Operating System active]_  
Beginning start-up in three…  
Two….  
One….  
**(still alive.)**


End file.
